Tuesday, December 5, 2017

LITURGICAL YEAR -- 3

ADVENT 2

+ The liturgical year begins with Advent which is a
precious holy season of watching, preparing, rejoicing and beholding as the
meme here suggests. How can we make this holy season significant for people of
all faiths and traditions? Can Advent become a gift of the Christian wisdom
tradition to the “new thing” going on, this movement of InterSpirituality? Can
we be guided by traditional Christian Advent themes and practices but also include
wisdom and practices from other traditions and even create new ones?

I hope so. Perhaps
this is a good time to offer some thoughts and resources on
InterSpirituality.

Here are some of the people, past and present, who are
leading this new and, I believe, essential movement: Rumi, Hazrat Inayat Khan,
The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Wayne Teasdale and Edward Bastian.

Let’s begin with Wayne Teasdale. I am in awe of the amazing contribution he
made to our knowledge of many wisdom traditions including but not limited to
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. You can find this
in three books I highly recommend: A MONK IN THE WORLD, THE MYSTIC HEART and
THE MYSTIC HOURS. It is interesting that he wrote these great books toward the
end of his life after having accumulated so much wisdom and experience. But he
not only wrote about InterSpirituality. He lived it as both a Roman Catholic
monk in the world and a Hindu monk in the world.

Here are several quotes:

·“Humanity stands at a crossroads between horror
and hope. In choosing hope, we must seed a new consciousness, a radically fresh
approach to life drawing its inspiration from perennial spiritual and moral
insights, intuition and experience. We call this new awareness interspiritual,
implying not the homogenization of religion, but the recovering of the shared mystic
heart beating in the center of the world’s deepest spiritual traditions.”

·“As our world becomes smaller, through a growing
common culture, the true test of community will be our tolerance for our most
profound differences and love for the most challenging among us.”

·“The real religion of humankind can be said to
be spirituality itself, because mystical spirituality is the origin of all the
world religions. If this is so, and I believe it is, we might also say that
inter-spirituality – the sharing of ultimate experiences across traditions – is
the religion of the third millennium.”

Edward Bastian has written a couple of books which offer
practical tools for creating a powerful InterSpiritual practice: InterSpiritual Meditation: A Seven-Step
Process from the World’s Spiritual Traditions and Mandala: Creating an Authentic Spiritual Path – – An InterSpiritual
Process. For mor information and to order, go to https://spiritualpaths.net/books/.
I highly recommend these books as well as the courses for which they are designed.

Future posts will draw heavily on these practices
since they can do so much to unite people of all traditions as we create The
New Faith for the New Earth and build am InterSpiritual Liturgical Year.+ Here are links to the first 2 posts >